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When an Echo Chamber Gets Worked Up About Echo Chambers

The following excerpt is from an article that originally appeared on Hit and Run Reason

The fear of filter bubbles has only grown stronger since Eli Pariser popularized the term at the beginning of the decade. Americans, he warned in his 2011 book The Filter Bubble, are “more and more enclosed in our own little bubbles. Democracy requires a reliance on shared facts; instead we’re being offered parallel but separate universes.” If you follow elite political discourse, you’ve probably heard several ever-more-worried versions of that idea.

Or at least I keep hearing them. It’s possible that they just seem ubiquitous in my own particular bubble.

Pariser’s portrait may be popular, but that doesn’t mean it’s well-grounded. Four academics—Andrew Guess, Benjamin Lyons, Brendan Nyhan, and Jason Reifler—have just published a skeptical take on the topic. Summarizing several studies, they argue that “the ‘echo chambers’ narrative captures, at most, the experience of a minority of the public.” For example: